I don't think it ever could have been that many. How about 5 nukes total?
I don't think it ever could have been that many. How about 5 nukes total?
Seven. One was expended in an open-ocean airburst test detected by the Vela 6911 satellite on 22 September 1979, and there's a possibility that a replacement for it was also built using engineering prototypes for some of the critical components. Plans to eventually rebuild and upgrade the South African devices by ARMSCOR around the year 2000 may mean that certain replacement elements beyond those needed for the proposed product improvement plan could have been used as a cover to build as many as three additional units, if the necessary additional nuclear material was also obtained; enough of the documentation and records from the SA nuclear program were destroyed that some such sleight-of-hand is possible. But the total number was around seven, certainly not more than a dozen.
The thousand-plus SA *tactical units* were not nuclear but chemical and bio-war weapons, largely from the Delta G, Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, and Spescop facilities, particularly those involved in the *Projekt Coast* efforts. The South African chemical/bio-war effort of the 1980s was said to be the second most productive in the world, behind only that of the Soviet Union at the time.
-archy-/-